Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/11/such-dfw-very-orwell-so-doge-wow/ <comment> vezzy-fnord tl;dr An article espousing the merits of postmodernism and the obsolescence of so-called "Standard White English" (formal English), while also being written largely in SWE itself.

Apparently, the "masses" read Reddit. Writing in formal academic English is for privileged white people and should be phased in favor of broken, anarchic, meme-inspired vernaculars, except on Wikipedia.

How charming.

<comment><USER2> It's a piece in favor of writing however you want to because CSWE is hard to express yourself in. It's not really in favor of meme-inspired vernacular ("a horrific mess") but maybe it's still better than constraining ourselves to formal English.

I'm not sure I agree with the part about people being mistrusted just because they speak that way though.

<comment><USER3> _CSWE is hard to express yourself in_

This claim baffles and infuriates me.

<comment><USER2> It's natural to express my opinions and experiences in a first-person account including emotions. That kind of thing isn't allowed in Wikipedia or textbooks, and is generally discouraged in the NYT and school essays.

<comment><USER3> Write a novel, or poetry, or whatever form you find appropriate. I do disagree with the notion that one can't express oneself without resorting to colloqialisms, but on the other hand I have no problem with using such devices for self-expression if they're what works best. On the other hand, when I read a newspaper like the NYT, I'm not interested in the authenticity of the writers' self-expression; I want a clear and dispassionate report or analysis of current events, just as in an essay I want an exploration of a particular topic.

I'm afraid I find the entire Techcrunch article redolent of neo-Marxist critical theory, which I think is intellectually bankrupt and antithetical to progress, and which brings on an overwhelming desire to projectile vomit upon its nearest exponent, so I'm a touch biased about this.

<comment><USER2> It's not just colloquialisms, but entire dialects, that are not allowed. A small subset of the population just declared that they way they write and speak is "correct" and everyone else is inferior simply because it is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have my own long, long column I'm working on (for TechCrunch, no less) on this topic. Nice to see Jon chiming in, but I think he dismisses the usefulness of the type of essentially formal prose being replaced by more conversational stuff. If you ask me, it's important to consider the strengths of the old way as well as the new one, which is what I'm attempting to do (4000 words and counting...).

Also, I disagree with the idea that SWE, or however you like to define it, works as a "mask." I express myself best in that language, personally, and I suspect many others do too. Conventional, "prescriptivist" English is to me very powerful, because the words all have agreed-upon meanings and relationships -- when you break those down, you allow new modes of expression but you reduce cointelligibility.

<comment><USER5> And we call that poetry.

<comment><USER6> Yep: [http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/](http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/).

<comment><USER5> Oh, _code poetry_. 'Ni code, ni poetry' &c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm willing to wager that future historians (combing, perhaps, through ancient metal disks found in strange sort of mausoleum in Utah) are going to be _greatly annoyed_ at deciphering communications from current times.

One of the annoying side-effects of memes (doge, le, whatever the next thing from 4chan is) is that they put very heavy context into whatever uses them-- they shade the meaning in a very particular way, and once you are lacking that context it becomes very hard to pull out meaningful information.

</comment><comment><USER8> Uh, okay. SWE exists. It is cold, impersonal and so forth. What now, am I supposed to rebel? Burn a library? Ohmigod, I think that _I 'm_ The Man now. [commits suicide]

This is just a lot of jumping up and down informing us that there is gravity, that it exists and works, and that it is cold and impersonal. Somehow I feel I am not improved by the information.

You want to rail on language? Try reading an Army manual. Or just about any computer documentation (equal opportunity here, btw, but if you crave a villain: Oracle, and we've just gone Godwin...)

</comment><comment><USER9> Apparently language standards are racist/classist/whatever against everyone except the people who made the standard.

Damn those British, oppressing me with spellings like "theatre" and "dialogue".

<comment><USER10> Not quite; there seems an implicit claim that oppressiveness exists along a gradient which, I can hardly resist observing, correlates closely with the average skin tone of those who employ a given dialect. On one end of this gradient, Wallace's "Standard White English" oppresses basically everyone on the planet save its few most fluent speakers; on the other, I've never seen anyone even _try_ to make a claim of oppressiveness on behalf of, for example, AAVE.

<comment><USER11> John Zerzan claims that all language is inherently oppressive.

Not that I agree, but there you are.

<comment><USER10> From what I can tell, he seems to claim that everything since the invention of agriculture is inherently oppressive.

I suppose it's a point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the spirit of the article:

TL;DR write all the words! much slang makes doge happy. disregard old farts' style. acquire upvotes, much happiness achieved!

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

I, for one, love good longform journalism (e.g longform.org) and appreciate the consistent usage of SWE. I'm not convinced the OP article's claim that SWE can make a commenter seem less trustworthy to other users on sites like reddit. The links to popular comments in r/bestof and r/DepthHub are almost always written in SWE.

</comment><comment><USER13> I posit that the author of this article has only ever read that one George Orwell essay[1]. If he had read any others he would have probably known better than to connect an author renowned for his clean, precise, journalistic prose to an argument about how such prose is outmoded.

[1]([http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_Language-1.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER14> For a guy who is trying to celebrate and identify with (possibly attach himself to) "the masses" for their nonstandard grammar, this guy sure comes off as pretentious. I don't think this is really about those topics. The author would just like everyone to know how smart he is for considering it.

<comment><USER10> While I don't love the author and carry no brief on his behalf, I would like to point out that "you're pretentious" and "you just want to look smart[er than everybody else]" are, in my experience, the two charges most commonly leveled against one who uses acrolect (the proper name for what Wallace calls "SWE"), by one who is incapable of doing the same.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps some do have such a reaction. I don't think this is the case for me specifically. He genuinely comes off as pretentious to me, and as someone who is very deeply interested in language I find the content intellectually vacuous. He hasn't really said anything, just made a few references.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Doge" is even more childish and cancerous than ragecomics. In 2 years most of us will try to forget how popular it once was.

<comment><USER16> Still don't understand if it's supposed to be pronounced as dog, doggie, dougue. But perhaps that's the point? Either way I've had quite enough of it.

<comment><USER10> If it helps, the English IPA for "doge" would be /doʊʒ/; if you need a key, Wikipedia has a good one: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English)

<comment><USER3> That's correct for dealing with the Doge of Venice, but there are many words in English that have multiple pronunciations depending on their individual meaning. In this canine context you really have to start from 'dog.'

<comment><USER10> I'll happily argue that, regardless of the path by which a given meme's promulgators happened to stumble upon an actual English word of whose existence they were (and perhaps still are) entirely ignorant, the established pronunciation is correct nonetheless.

Besides, if you start from /dɔːg/, you more or less invariably end up at /dɔːgə/ or /doʊgə/, both of which are so ugly to speak and to hear that arguing against them seems worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> The existing word _Doge_ is Italian and describes the rulers of a particular few Italian city states, so I don't think generalizing from that makes much sense: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge)

I personally pronounce mem-Doge as Doggie, which I find an amusing parallel to the grammatical mismatches upon which the humor depends.

<comment><USER10> _Doge_ is indeed originally an Italian word, but it's also a loanword in English [1], this being of course the entire basis on which rests my argument above. And I try not to pronounce the meme version at all.

[1] [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doge#English](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doge#English)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article seems to be anti-establishment for the sake of being anti- establishment.

Intentionally "broken" English can be fun and cute and equally valid and expressive as standard English - if not for the adoption of it - but I don't see much that actually _improves_ on more standard English, in a more-or-less objective way. An improvement might be to promote a gender-neutral pronoun ('they' for example) and disambiguating "you" when it is unclear if you are talking about singular you, personal you or 'general' you.

Or maybe this is totally unrelated to what the author is talking about.

<comment><USER10> Say what else you like about Southern American English, but we solve the second-person plural problem quite handily with nominative and oblique _y 'all_, and genitive _y 'all's_.</comment></comment>


Fixing Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/twitter <comment><USER3> > Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the > ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to > interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.

This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets _do_ get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction.

I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for _every_ celebrity.

So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.

<comment><USER4> I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to interact with strangers on a regular basis.

<comment><USER5> Just wait till Kanye West or Taylor Swift come out with a smart reply-bot based on their online presence and it's gonna be all the rage.

<comment><USER6> The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes).

I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it."

(Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.")

P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans _actually do purchase frequently when given the chance_.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I'm sure twitter could highlight the followers with the most followed and then Kanye could reply to them. He could also get a highlight of those most engaged in twitter (though they might not have a lot of followers) and tweet to them as well.

And, while it's at it, twitter could provide some kind of AI analysis of his followers to find the ones who are the most positive and have said the most positive things about Kanye.

Hell, they could even advertise they're doing that. Imagine being a rabid fan and learning that if you say lots of nice things about Kanye all over twitter that it'll bring you to his attention and he'll start personally replying to your tweets! Oh the algorithmic cult of personality...

<comment><USER8> We were verified on Twitter last week, and one of the useful additions is a verified notifications tab, which similarly, allows us to quickly see 'important' accounts interacting with us amongst all the 'noise'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth.

Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.

<comment><USER10> I can believe that the growth was significantly helped by third-party clients, but I wouldn't believe that the more creative twitter integrations had a major effect. That would be a dev/techy-centric view of the world, similar to those that truly believe that the real-name policy was a mainstream issue that killed G+.

<comment><USER11> When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Nothing great is Built On Twitter"

That quote sums it all up.

Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place.

Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to "own it all" like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early.

Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a tweetstorming app [http://writerack.com](http://writerack.com). It pulls and pushes all it's content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves.

If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too.

Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.

<comment><USER13> I think there are two pretty good reasons that Twitter moved away from being an open platform, and they are: 1) ensuring a good user experience, and 2) making money.

The tweetstorming thing, for example, conveniences particular writers at the expense of all the other writers (and quite a number of readers). I hate it, and will unfollow anybody who does it regularly. It's the tragedy of the commons for an attention economy. Twitter's demand that people be concise is a large part of its value to readers. The more they control the UI, the easier it is to nudge people in particular directions that shape good user experiences.

But that's a small thing next to making money. To experiment with various ad products, they need extremely fine grained control of and reporting on user experience, and they need to be able to rapidly change that as they come up with new ideas. That's hard enough even when they control everything; getting a zillion developers to do that is impossible.

Focusing on the core was great, but nobody was paying them for the core. They're spending ~$1.5 billion/year. Anybody who says, "Twitter should do X" without explaining how their plan will help pay the bills is not going to get a lot of consideration at Twitter HQ.

<comment><USER12> Re: I get where you are coming from. However, people use services differently. Twitter has failed in determining how services should be used.

Re: Annoying Tweetstorming.

People should be able to mute content from certain apps. Just like you can silence your Candy Crushers.

Re: Making Money.

On a sarcastic note, "I'll think of a way if I am paid 6 figures a year" :). But seriously, we are making content more valuable by adding more people to its service. Twitter can retain the rights to serve ads on those third party services while sharing some of the ad revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations > broadcast text. That's it.

It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where _I_ get to decide who's there. And it works great for that.

> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on > realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or > when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner > at the top that says "follow this breaking event."

Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner" telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it.

When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it.

Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.

Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.

<comment><USER15> Thank you a bunch for saying this, I feel the same way. I cultivate a list of accounts I follow strictly because their posts tend to be relevant or interesting.

If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post garbage.

I follow people primarily in tech and programming. Most of them use Twitter to talk about things they work on, issues they have, things that are interesting. Occasionally they share something funny, but I rarely see something distasteful or annoying. Sometimes I follow somebody and after a few days I feel like I'm not getting any benefit from what they are posting--it will be annoying or I will realize that they are trying to reach an audience with a different set of values--and I unfollow them. That's OK, they are not meeting my expectations.

The argument for Twitter being broken because signal/noise ratio is like saying email is broken because your inbox is full of newsletters for sites you don't like. The problem isn't with email, it is with how you are using it. Unsubscribe, clean it out, make a new address...

<comment><USER16> But that's the exact problem for many average users. They were shunted into a default track of follwing 10s of "garbage" posters. My mom's Gmail inbox is exactly this problem - she has dozens of daily useless newsletters she was default opted into and can't be bothered to unsubscribe (or doesn't find it easy), so they just pile up and make email pretty useless. So yes, it's their fault, but the product needs to correct for this behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.

<comment><USER18> Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter. Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?

<comment><USER19> Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers, musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you created resonates with people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit.

When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort.

Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?

<comment><USER21> It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...

<comment><USER22> most incredible news you've had in your life can be shared in 140 characters.

most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be several paragraphs.

that's why it worked.

<comment><USER23> What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be.

It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to _read_ less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details.

Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - <USER2> in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it.

This sort of behaviour is something you see a _lot_ of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects.

Just off the top of my head, weibo has:

\- the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics")

\- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular)

\- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw

\- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow

\- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system

I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER25> As I've written in past comments ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396)), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially Twitter.

<comment><USER13> Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.

<comment><USER25> I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions / public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Twitter doesnt seem like it's capitalized on what it's good at, or anything really.

For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps.

For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition)

For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news.

What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow.

However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either.

It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There's just no focus here...

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business.

Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion _still_ don't have a clear idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events? Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends?

From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy. They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don't have clear leadership.

And then there's the politics of infighting, and some of their executives being "overthrown" over time... I can't see how you can create a good culture when people at the top are behaving like that. It's hardly rocket science - just focus on the product and your users.

I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?

<comment><USER28> The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala, though far more importantly, it was a _re- architecting_. And there are zero regrets. Without it, Twitter wouldn't exist anymore.

<comment><USER27> >The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala

Sorry, you're exactly correct. It was Ruby -> Scala and Java.

To be precise, according to Tony Pritezis from Twitter, Scala is the main language, Java is next, Ruby was still in use in 2014 but migrating away, C/C++ and Python for some specific tasks. He did also talk about some of the problems of using Scala, and I seem to recall someone saying that Scala may be less favoured at Twitter in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users.

There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions.

On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube.

And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.

</comment><comment><USER30> The image cropping is something that annoys me. Someone will often post a photo in the their timeline that is pointless when it is cropped. eg a Meme with the captions missing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great points all. Especially #5.

One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter.

Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.

<comment><USER3> I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market.

Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.

<comment><USER31> Topsy has a simple "from" flag to restrict search results to a certain user. It only works sometimes when used directly in the Twitter search box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations > broadcast text.

That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: [http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures- product-te...](http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-team- promotes-jeff-seibert/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter.

"There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses."

Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k->500k) individual, and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get a retweet.

For < 50k follower people, I almost always get a response if what I sent was thoughtful.

Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to _those_ responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the original person who tweeted altogether.

I'm not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too much) the back and forth/threading/responding that twitter offers. I really, really don't need any more.

</comment><comment><USER35> My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the mobile apps for "suggested tweets." (example: [http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png](http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png) )

As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.

</comment><comment><USER36> I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can't. Most of the content in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don't know the "correct" people to follow. Finding the "correct" people to follow is difficult, and even then they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :/ I wish there was a way to filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff.

Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet, its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are below the tweet (which is confusing as I don't read from the bottom up most of the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!!

Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now, I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they come into focus. How annoying is that!?

I really like the "World News Headline" feature that Dustin proposes and would probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine/Instagram clone I probably won't be hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(

</comment><comment><USER37> Bigger issue is no developer trusts twitter any more. Just like LinkedIn. twitter has been unkind to the developers which helped it make popular. Remember things like lists, hashtags, media embed are all brought to twitter before twitter did so itself. But developers of these innovations were treated badly. And hence no developer wants to develop for twitter platform any more.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram provides. I do find Twitter's displaying of replies and retweets (to the first 100) questionable.

As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally- scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.

</comment><comment><USER39> Twitter need to focus more on developers. The underlying concept behind the site is really solid. Allowing people to build cool things which adds value and brings in new users is good for everyone. So make it easy for them! Their API is not great, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they don't release official libraries for the major languages?

</comment><comment><USER40> Twitter's problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone else.

Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more.

Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.

<comment><USER13> That may be trading one problem for another. The number one complaint I hear about Facebook is how unpredictable the feed is. For power users, Twitter's current approach to their feed is predictable and reliable: strict time order, nothing missing from the people you want to hear from.

At the beginning of the year Twitter started testing out a "while you were away" feature that curates, currently on mobile only: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while- you-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-were- away/)

Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.

<comment><USER41> I see "while you were away" on the browser/desktop version as well....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over FB/Email/Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its painful over Twitter and I'm not sure how it could be made better. Everyone talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech. Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at anyone (unlike a Facebook/HN thread which is usually around a specific topic), you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations.

However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's (or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram.

That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways).

The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending.

Lastly, FTA > _Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text._

I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Your word in Twitter's ear!

I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter & Apple's AppStore fail in the same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud & clear as to the platform owner's intentions.

</comment><comment><USER44> I very much like tweets be ethereal like SnapChat snaps. Many people don't like to keep a history of stuff they said previously.

<comment><USER30> I know somebody who has a script setup to delete the majority of his tweets (except for blog posts) after 24 hours.

[https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto- delete/](https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot. It's actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake news tweets and want over 80% accuracy.

Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it's something you actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.

</comment><comment><USER46> Twitter is very confusing and useless to anyone who wants to use less than one hour per day. So, if they focused on interactivity between anonimous,famous and "live events", most people who do not want to live on Twitter, will have a reason to open the app at least a few times a day.

</comment><comment><USER47> Tech celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki have had teams of tweeters working for them for years: it seems reasonable to assume large numbers of people are employed to interact with show biz personality obsessives...just like all the faked autographs the Monkees etc used to mail to their fans...

</comment><comment><USER48> > The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the > biggest failings of Twitter's product team.

This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the MM+ tweeter is half way savvy they'd do what Zuck does and reply to some small % of his followers. I'm sure if they did that, a 13 year old follower would irrationally hope that their tweet was seriously read and would engage in the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into facebook

So, yeah..

</comment><comment><USER50> Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being subjected to a high volume/low quality stream of garbage is not good for the mind.

<comment><USER51> Why not just unfollow the accounts which are posting garbage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Dustin clearly doesn't follow @cher if he thinks there's no meaningful interaction with celebrities going on on Twitter

</comment><comment><USER53> Yes, and for that last few months the "Whats new" message on Google Play has been: We made it easier to add you comments to others tweets - or something to that effect.

I have been saying their problem is they have been too busy painting themselves into a corner:

      [v] alienating 3rd part developers
      [v] public by default - no organization level settings
      [v] keep the cute 140 char limit that is now just an historic artifact

I guess you can add more to that list.

</comment><comment><USER54> Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product [1].

There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be.

[1] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html)

<comment><USER35> Unlike Trello, Twitter is publicly-traded with mandated financial disclosures, so discussion is fair.

<comment><USER54> But the post won't discuss about financials. It went on bashing twitter as if it at its current state is pretty much screwed up which I disagree because I am quite active on the platform and find it cool.

-> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction.

I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ?

[Edit: added some reference from the post]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If Twitter didn't exist, what would the world use instead?

<comment><USER41> Facebook. That's really Twitter's major problem. Facebook used to be mostly friends chatting to family and friends, but nowadays it's the single biggest source of news links and the sort of viral spam that used to circulate on Twitter.

Twitter is still a faster and more reliable source of breaking news, but not that many people (apart from journalists) care about speed. And Facebook's threaded chat provides a much better way to discuss stories than Twitter.

In sum, for most people, Facebook's news feed is probably now a better Twitter than Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> twitter's default landing page is more interesting than the default page that you see after login

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet.

> First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast > system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way > interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl > goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the > product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the > responses.

Let's force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he gets to each any of his tweets.

Let's also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all.

> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on > realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or > when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner > at the top that says "follow this breaking event."

No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in Bangkok, I simply don't care. If I did, I'd use the search engine. And by knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make you dismiss it each time (along with a nice "Did you like this?").

> Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does > adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for > my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width > images in the feed?

Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that's what it was.

> Fourth, let's talk about third party payloads/integrations on Twitter. They > have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely > dire state.

Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged.

> And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also > the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned > into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. > That's it.

So don't follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using Twitter to earn themselves money.

> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the > biggest failings of Twitter's product team–Twitter should be the place for > apps to broadcast realtime information about someone.

So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don't be silly, who wants to read "Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!" "Mike has uploaded this pic to Instagram!!" all day? You? No, nobody, that's why these integrations with automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram I'd follow you there, jackass!

There, I vented it.

<comment><USER58> When/how did Twitter mess up third party clients? I find the official apps/page terrible (hard to follow conversations, embedded ads etc) and I'm very happy with tweetbot as my client.

<comment><USER57> They severely limited the amount of requests per minute (for example you can only reload your timeline 15 times every 15 minutes). They have also refused to open up the API endpoints that would allow those 3rd party apps to have a functionality on par with the official clients. They also limited the number of authenticated accounts under one app to 100,000, a limit which has been hit by some clients already.

That said it must be understood that tweetbot is probably the only worthy 3rd party client as of now. There are lots of Android clients but they are all of a very low quality. Whether this is because of the lack of incentives to build an app that uses an API that could close at any moment, or just reveals how bad Android apps are overall, remains to be seen.

Four years ago or so I used twicca, which was pretty good at that moment, but it hasn't been updated since then.

According to Ryan Sarver, former Twitter Platform Director:

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." "We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development- ta...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development- talk/yCzVnHqHIWo/sC34r_ZyMLYJ)

<comment><USER58> Ok thanks that explains a lot. It's true that tweetbot does seem to stand out, I did try a few others and while they were a lot better than the official, they were still flawed in one or many ways.

It struck me as odd to have a public API that serves the same content twitter is serving themselves, while they actively lower the quality of their own content by introducing ads! Maybe they have finally realized that, and will just keep strangling the API until they own their own content once again.

You couldn't imagine youtube having a free API that served the same videos without ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I love that the author is criticizing Twitter's UI, yet when I tried to find a date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to see it magically appear before me.

<comment><USER60> Ehh, it's right there at 0.05 opacity. It just gets opacity: 1 when hovering. Try tuning your monitor, you should really be able to see that.

<comment><USER61> Nice if you have a big monitor in perfect lighting conditions and good eyes. Grandparent's complaint is legit.

<comment><USER60> His complaint that a readability issue on a single string somehow makes the author unsuited to comment on the clusterfuck that is twitters UI? I don't agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.

<comment><USER35> > _a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the > major stakeholders._

As Twitter is a _publicly-traded company_ , it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.

<comment><USER62> "Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark Zuckerberg does.

<comment><USER63> How come?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for link-sharing.

If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character.

In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.

<comment><USER42> What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any different from what Tumblr has now.

After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is _great_ from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100 twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.

<comment><USER64> But Tumblr is Tumblr, they start from a different context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Who cares about Twitter? Sublevel is way better than that crappy thing.

</comment><comment><USER66> Twitters problem, is that you had an idea, and it took 5243 characters to relate it. So, instead of using their platform you went elsewhere.

(139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)

<comment><USER22> and if you had written 5243 characters about what you just said (and you could have), then I wouldn't have read a word.

<comment><USER22> I'm being honest - you took a position and defended it, I read it, and moved on. All in 139 characters.

I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000 characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word processor, if 11-point text.)

this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.

</comment><comment><USER68> I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on the first page, that's a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.

<comment><USER3> How is bloat related to their viability as a business / long-term profitability? Does the extra bandwidth cost them a significant amount of money? Does it negatively impact a significant number of users in their target market, sufficiently so that they will stop using Twitter?</comment></comment>


IFrame loop - <AUTHOR> http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2006/crime2006

<comment><USER2> People with disabled caching might get accused of DDoS(attempting) their servers just by visiting that URL. :o

<comment><USER3> Are you kidding? He manipulated the URL without explicit permission. This is a clear violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and moreover, hacking!

<comment> test-it OP name is Omar, so clearly this is a terrorist act.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ..this is news?

<comment><USER5> No it's just funny.</comment></comment>


What is Intel's Thunderbolt 3 dual port controller's total bandwidth? - roger- https://communities.intel.com/message/560462 <comment><AUTHOR> Thunderbolt, and Intel's "management" of that interface spec, is an excellent contrasting example of IEEE interfaces vs closed systems. I actively worked on a project building around TB2 (and then 3) for over two years and eventually we gave up on the entire thing due to the obscurity of the protocol, the absence of details of the Intel implementations (the only game in town at the time), and a myriad other roadblocks. By contrast I have some historical familiarity with Sony's Firewire iterations and once it became IEEE-1394 (and variants) it exploded in both popularity and transparency.

If Intel treated the original USB in the same way they do ThunderBolt, we'd still be using ADB, serial, parallel, and PS/2 interfaces on all our machines.

<comment><USER2> Did FireWire actually "explode" in popularity? It was standard on Macs, Sonys, and most business Dell's at the time but it never got widespread consumer use.

The "problem" with Thunderbolt is the same as with Firewire, it's overkill for most of the consumer market. I don't think that's a deal breaker, people who are willing and able to pay for computers with Thunderbolt and devices have plenty of options.

<comment><USER3> At least with Thunderbolt the port can be used for other purposes since it's backwards compatible.

<comment><USER2> Which makes the situation worse. You can't tell what the port actually supports. For instance only two of the four "Thunderbolt 3" ports on the pre-2018 MacBook Pros with Touch Bar supported the full speed of Thunderbolt.

The Macbook has one port that looks the same but it isn't a Thunderbolt 3 port and only supports speeds up to 5Gbps.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's more the idiocy of USB-C than Thunderbolt itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Thunderbolt* is customized by each system manufacturer differently on their > platforms. For this reason, our recommendation is that you can contact your > system manufacturer to receive accurate information about their products the > Thunderbolt* 3 implementation.

This means ask your system manufacturer to give the bad news.

<comment><USER5> You were patient enough to read the article? ;) I just skipped to the comments because I assumed it's full of marketing lies.

<comment><USER6> The link goes to a forum post, not an article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thunderbolt is a quite under-documented protocol. I realize it's proprietary (for now) but even by those standards there is almost nothing publicly available. Maybe Intel doesn't want people to know that a dual-port "40 Gbps" Thunderbolt controller only has 32 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth total and according to this question each port only supports 22 Gbps. This may explain why real- world benchmarks don't show performance anywhere near 40 Gbps (although TB3 is generally still faster than any other consumer protocol).

<comment><USER7> Without an IOMMU it's a gigantic security risk. I don't know that withholding documentation does anything to slow that down in practice but I wonder if it's somehow part of the obscurity.

<comment><USER8> As far as I know nearly all recent Intel chips have an IOMMU: are you saying thunderbolt bypasses it?

Also, there is the thunderbolt authorization protocol (see: boltctl on Linux): is that broken in any way?

<comment><USER9> Intel continued to use the IOMMU feature for product segmentation on mainstream desktop and laptop processors launched as late as 2015, and they've continued to launch Atom-based processors lacking an IOMMU as recently as one year ago. Most systems new enough and powerful enough to support Thunderbolt should at least be free of Intel's arbitrary restrictions on IOMMU capability, but that doesn't mean the firmware and OS actually set it up to provide real security.

<comment><USER10> No systems with TB have any of these restrictions as VT-d was supported by all platforms that support TB since DMA and Interrupt remapping is required for TB to operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A Thunderbolt controller contains a Converged I/O switch (CIO) plus a PCIe switch. The Downstream Ports on the PCIe switch are attached to the CIO switch and represent so-called PCIe adapters which encapsulate PCIe datagrams into Thunderbolt datagrams.

The PCIe throughput is thus the minimum of the CIO switch's capacity, the PCIe switch's capacity and the PCIe adapter's capacity. The PCIe 4 lane interface is only how the Upstream Port on the PCIe switch is attached to the CPU or PCH.

It is very unlikely that Intel will answer this question satisfactorily because they'd reveal details of the controller's internal architecture.

Note that a PCIe tunnel may pass through a Thunderbolt controller without being terminated on it. The CIO switch must then handle that tunnel's traffic in addition to any tunnels terminated on it.

(Disclosure, I've authored a couple of commits in the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt driver.)

<comment><USER12> > It is very unlikely that Intel will answer this question satisfactorily > because they'd reveal details of the controller's internal architecture.

Amazingly dense. It's like they don't want anyone to use Thunderbolt.

<comment><USER3> They want you to use it as a black box. It works, just don't ask how it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Level 1 Techs does a great video on getting Thunderbolt via USB-C working on Ryzen Threadripper. You can run Thunderbolt on Threadripper, but not Ryzen 7.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOlQbP63lDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOlQbP63lDQ)

I think the reason this question so so hard to answer for Intel is because Thunderbold on Intel goes through the chipset, after which it's on a shared PCIx4 lane to the processor. The main reason for this is hotplugging PCI-E is difficult.

On Threadripper, the Leve1Tech use a lot of hacks to get an Intel Thurnderbolt controller connected directly to the PCIE lanes that go straight to the processor.

</comment><comment><USER14> The first response posted is absolutely hilarious and perfectly summarizes basically every educated person's attempt to get tech support from any large company.

<comment><USER15> I tried to get my static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses from Comcast the other day. The customer rep asked me what I meant by "static IP address." And I'm like-- wait, how much do I actually explain about what a static IP is? I might as well have been talking to the cat that hangs out on my porch, but that cat was the only one who could kick me up to someone who knew what she was talking about...

<comment><USER16> It's rather sad that customer support for an ISP would not know what a static IP is. Then again, they're probably usually telling more "average" users to reset their modems and asking if things are turned on and plugged in...

<comment><USER12> They usually don't _need_ to know what a static IP address is. A good rep will know that this is above their league and connect you right to somebody who knows what you mean. The availability of such a person depends on the quality of the customer service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> AFAIR Intel alway is like that. Intel hardly open their documentations to the public because they only communicate with big PC/motherboard manufacturers, not individuals.

Intel did the same thing to hobbyist communities when Intel tried to enter consumer IoT market with Arduino101/Edison/Curie. They did open sourced the code (more than a year late since released the hardware though) but never provided good enough public documentations about the chips. Intel eventually gave up the market.

<comment><USER12> It's always amazing to me when a company has garbage developer support and then wonders why nobody wants to use their stuff or does anything good with it.

<comment><USER17> Intel actually is a chip manufacturer that has the best dev support for organizations. e.g. Intel is the biggest contributor for the Linux ecosystem. It is just their business model didn't work well for open-source consumer IoT device market which is driven by hobbyist and relatively small companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The answer is, it depends. PCIe is not a streaming interface, so the effective bandwidth depends on transaction type, latency, packet size, address depth, etc. etc. The only certainty is that it will not be anywhere close to 32gbps, that is line rate.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm still pretty disappointed that AMD's alternative to Intel's Thunderbolt, which I think they called something like "Lightning Bolt", never went anywhere. It struck me then as a cheaper open alternative which could do most of the things people would really want to use Thunderbolt for but without the costs.

<comment><USER20> What would the benefit be though? It seems that while not as fast, USB 3.0 pretty much covers all the usecases and is actually widely deployed due to its lower cost. Would AMD's port fare any better than TB?

<comment><USER21> > _What would the benefit be though? It seems that while not as fast, USB 3.0 > pretty much covers all the usecases_

Foremost, eGPU and external RAID storage units. However, only native Thunderbolt 3 implementation makes sense in order to meet compatibility standards.

<comment><USER12> Exactly this. The exposure of PCIe is way more powerful than what USB can deliver.

But Intel seems to have - for the third time, with the conditions better than ever - really messed up the Thunderbolt launch/promotion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Meanwhile, the bandwidth of a single-port 9-pin Atari controller is almost well understood.

<comment><USER23> But does it do 22Gbps?

<comment><USER12> You're giving me an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What if they told you their products are so fast they don't need a total bandwidth?</comment>


Show HN: I'm releasing my game for free - <AUTHOR> https://victorqribeiro.itch.io/qubes <comment><USER2> Sokoban is at the spritual center of a relatively new (or newly invigorated) and pretty hardcore subgenre of puzzle games. Who knew there could be so many interesting ways to push blocks around in a grid? Some good ones are Heroes of Sokoban I, II and III[1][2][3], A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build[4], Stephen's Sausage Roll[5], Ferdy the Cat[6], Kine[7], Snakebird[8] and Baba is You[9].

Each and every one of these games have _undo_. That's critical for this type of game. Forcing the player to restart because of a single mistake is about the least interesting way to make a puzzle game more difficult.

1: [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of_Sokoban.html)

2: [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of_Sokoban_II_Monsters.html)

3: [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of_Sokoban_III_The_Bard_and_The_Druid.html)

4: [https://agoodsnowman.com](https://agoodsnowman.com)

5: [https://www.stephenssausageroll.com](https://www.stephenssausageroll.com)

6: [https://ferdythecat.com](https://ferdythecat.com)

7: [https://www.kinegame.com](https://www.kinegame.com)

8: [https://noumenongames.itch.io/snakebird](https://noumenongames.itch.io/snakebird)

9: [https://www.hempuli.com/baba/](https://www.hempuli.com/baba/)

<comment><USER3> Strong recommendation for Baba Is You, probably the best puzzle game I've played in a long while. I won't say more since it's best played blind.

<comment><USER4> Seconded.

Half of the pleasure of "baba is you" is to discover it. The game assumes this perfectly, and is actually structured to make that discovery part of the gameplay: it's incremental, pleasant, and it surprises you in good ways.

I sometime even laugh at the way the game designer played with me. With one specific block present or missing. With one rule you didn't know about, or didn't think about that way. It's communicating playfulness without a having to say a word.

This game is a beautiful thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who don't know this game is called Sokoban. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban)

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I added the "sokoban" tag to my game page. As I said on other comment, the difference between QUBES and a classic sokoban game is that on QUBES the amount of moves you make counts.

It's not enough to solve the puzzle, you have to solve it the best way possible.

Big O notation?

<comment><USER6> It's not the first sokoban game to score based on number of moves.

But heck, writing an original clone of an already-extant game is an interesting exercise especially for beginner game devs. So cherish the victory of having finished and released it!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you. but I swear I had never seen a sokoban game that counts your moves. Well, I haven't search it either, so it doesn't count, but I remember playing sokoban on DOS when I was a kid and it didn't count the moves.

<comment><USER7> You can see moves being counted in this port for the TRS-80 Color Computer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncsglTE2xoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncsglTE2xoY)

I had that game as a child. Even though it counted moves, I never paid attention to it. I only cared about finishing the level. Your game puts more emphasis on the number of moves especially with showing the minimum number of moves to solve a level. That gives it more replay value.

<comment><USER8> I had a CoCo as a child too.

I remember thinking the Microsoft "Extended" Basic for the CoCo was pretty cool. Although it was pretty painful manually typing in source code from magazines to try new programs (I think the main magazine back then was "Rainbow").

The tweens today who have only used Github for getting code don't know how good they have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Victor Ribeiro, author of the game. Yesterday I was let go of my job due to COVID-19. After I got the news, I sat down on my notebook and made a quick port of QUBES to release on itch.io

I understand that the game is a not a 5 stars game and there's room for improvement, some requests I may implement on the next update, but, I'm now working on a new game that I plan to release soon.

I think this new game is more fun. I suggest following me on twitter, itch.io, youtube or github to check it out.

As I told, I'm not working right now so if you liked QUBES and want to support me and the developing of other games, I suggest you make a donation you itch.io, paypal or consider becoming a patreon.

Here I go by atum47, but on all other platforms I'm usually victorqribeiro. On youtube I'm always putting videos of my projects, my english is far from good, but I'm working on my pronunciation.

On GitHub I'm always publishing open source projects that might help others or even serve as a starting point for a project. IsoCity is a good example of that. There are people working on some cool new things using IsoCity as a foundation. So, make sure you take a look at my projects at GitHub also.

Thank you so much for playing the game and for the inputs/feedback.

</comment><comment><USER9> My 4 year old is enjoying it. Interesting to watch him work through the process. Kept his attention for 15 minutes or so (which is pretty damn good). Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, nice one. thanks a lot for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kind of strange a non move counts as one, if I just hold the arrow key over on a block that can't move, it will be 157 moves in no time.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, you moved, the wall just pushed you back.

bad jokes aside, I designed it that way.

<comment><USER11> For me, that's not how I expected it to work and don't agree.

To move a long distance, I spam the direction until I hit the wall without care of 'wasted moves'.

I didn't understand why I didn't get the optimum moves the first time.

Regardless, thanks for developing the game and releasing it for free. I'm enjoying it while I'm stuck at home!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I cant start the game, getting some errors and connections to doubleclick. index.html:177 Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document. at loadGame ([https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2099093/index.html:177:3...](https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2099093/index.html:177:30)) at Image.textures.onload ([https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2099093/index.html:217:4](https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2099093/index.html:217:4)) loadGame @ index.html:177 textures.onload @ index.html:217 load (async) loadAssets @ index.html:216 (anonymous) @ index.html:225 www-embed- player.js:438 GET [https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id](https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id) net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT Xe @ www-embed-player.js:438 We @ www-embed- player.js:424 (anonymous) @ www-embed-player.js:726 N @ www-embed- player.js:312 mj @ www-embed-player.js:723 xe @ www-embed-player.js:736 yj @ www-embed-player.js:741 zj @ www-embed-player.js:742 (anonymous) @ www-embed- player.js:759 (anonymous) @ 0lP8Q6u1Shw:12 www-embed-player.js:542 GET [https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js](https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js) net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT

</comment><comment><USER13> I played one level around 80 and was able to figure out how it works without reading any instructions. You did good.

<comment><AUTHOR> well, thank you. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is the source available? I'm curious how you're able to run either as an app, or in the browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the thing with mobile and desktop on mind (touch and keyboard controls, render to several types of screen). Then this line does the magic:

       const isMobile = /iPhone|iPad|iPod|Android/i.test(navigator.userAgent);

if isMobile = true, I show you the touch controls

I'm holding the source code on this one for now, cause I'm trying to make a bucket out of it. But I'll release it soon enough. Check out my github for some other fun projects as well

<comment><USER14> Cool, thanks for sharing that.

<comment><AUTHOR> you're welcome

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like it.

I used to play KSokoban, when I used KDE long time ago. Now, someone took the assets of KSokoban and made an online version.

[https://ksokoban.online](https://ksokoban.online)

It's in essence the same game.

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember playing the first time I used Linux also, when I was a teenager. later I got hooked in computer graphics (3D and vfx) and went back to windows.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In QUBES your goal is to move the boxes to their happy places making the least amount of moves possible. After the end of each level you get stars based on your efficiency. Hope you have fun playing it.

<comment><USER15> Like Sokoban.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. two things: on QUBES efficiency matters, you have to complete the levels making the least amount of moves.

Since I wrote a solver / level generator for my game, I'm able to tell how many moves you need to make to finish the level as efficient as possible.

<comment><USER16> Given that possible moves for each level are discrete, does your solver work with an algorithm or by trying all possible inputs?

<comment><AUTHOR> each movement (left, right, top, bottom) generate a new state, the algorithm goes around searching the whole game for a "win" state

<comment><USER16> And then ranks them by shortest.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I needed a way to classify the levels by the difficulty. I should have done a double sort, one for the number of goals (boxes) and then the number of minimum moves necessary to finish the level.

<comment><USER16> This is a pretty standard way of creating solvers for puzzles that have discrete states. When you are searching for a shortest solution you can also hash states to track losing paths and abandon them early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you like this type of game check out 'Adventures of Lolo' on an NES emulator, circa 1989.

</comment><comment><USER18> A nice open-source library to create similar games is [https://www.puzzlescript.net/](https://www.puzzlescript.net/)

</comment><comment><USER19> hi, thanks much. very fun. any chance you could add keyboard shortcuts to the menu items after completing a level? (try again, next, menu) so that a user doesn't need to switch from keyboard to mouse.

<comment><AUTHOR> With space bar you can go to the next level. I'll try to add the other ones later, is that ok?

<comment><USER19> cool. add a comment/indicator that space bar advances?

<comment><AUTHOR> on the game? because it's on the description of the game, on the itch.io page.

The game was supposed to be mobile only, I just had a bad day today and made a quick hack to make it available on desktop.

I'll try to refine it more, later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great! Small, efficient, easy to understand even for a someone who has never seen Sokoban (me!).

One small feedback, it would be great if there were an undo. It's really frustrating to make one mistake twenty moves in and have to start over. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I remember seeing one game where you had like 3 undos and 3 solutions, and you can buy more. I have decided no to that. but I'm really glad you liked it

<comment><USER20> No I mean literally just add a U button that undoes the last move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some little improvements I'd like to see:

\- an option to mute audio

\- a counter to see how many moves I did by now

<comment><AUTHOR> if you click the square button (when playing any level) you'll get a option to mute sound and music

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of Chip's Challenge. :)

<comment><USER23> This comment brought back some lovely memories of my grandfather, who got into computers late in his life and had all sorts of games on his Windows 95 (I think it was originally Windows 3.1) machine. One of them was Chip's Challenge, and it was the only game my brother and I could play together (at about 5 and 7 in the late 90s) and take turns without squabbling because half the fun was puzzling out the solution to each level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Please add on-screen controls for tablet (and phone) users

</comment><comment><USER25> That's brilliant :) The last level was really fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much. Really nice seeing your work being appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Did anyone ever play Microsoft Tinker? [0] This game kind of reminds me of that, I spent a lot of hours playing Tinker on my old computer!

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tinker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tinker)

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh no, the kind of game I have to force myself to stop or I'll spend the whole night playing.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, you're the second one. I have met only one other person who I know was addicted to the game. I know that cause she wrote me an email asking for the 3 stars solution for the 12 level. really funny

<comment><USER27> I started having trouble around there too, at 10 and 11. I had to settle for 2 star solutions. I knew I could spend all night trying to do all this (3 stars or nothing) so I called it quits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me a little of Pengo.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pengo_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pengo_\(video_game\))

</comment><comment><USER29> @atum47 - Fun game! How were the optimal number of moves determined?

<comment><AUTHOR> I turn each state of the game into a node and then I search the minimum cost path to a node with the "win" state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me a little bit of Heartlight PC.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqIO3Zet-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqIO3Zet-o)

</comment><comment><USER31> I installed the game but it crashes immediately on opening. I'm on an oldish phone (OnePlus Two) which may explain why.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not able to donate. Accept payment from India?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, itch.io handles the donations

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is good fun. Needs more music variety! Perhaps a new track every 10 levels or so, otherwise the loop gets stale!

</comment><comment><USER34> got an initial black screen until I pressed 'r'

figured out what to do, then it froze. Pressing space bar did nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> space bar works only when you finish the level, to go to the next one. for the rest, I'm afraid you'll have to click the buttons

<comment><USER34> Click buttons? There are no buttons to click. And no indication clicks are being received or being used.

It looks like a fun thing to play while a build is running, I'll check back if it crosses my radar again.

<comment><AUTHOR> did you try the google play version?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nice little browser-based Sokoban clone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. This project was born literally from me writing a level generator for sokoban. I added some free open source 2d art, some sound fx, some music, gave the game a story (the boxes are sad away from their happy place, help them) and BAM. Got myself a game.

<comment><USER16> Why not add one new game mechanic?

<comment><AUTHOR> because I'm a garbage person, right after I upload this one I was already working on something new.

I'll trying my luck as a indie game dev for now, and this is not a game that people would buy or spent a lot of time playing. so, after I thought I had enough for a "game" and released.

Tomorrow I'll start working on a new game. This next one I'll put more thought into it.

<comment><USER36> Please, be a garbage person and release stuff. Don't be a tidy person who bikesheds and procrastrinates forever, like most of us. Garbage persons make the world go round.

Edit: Lovely game, btw! Congrats.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you. =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> For the best Sokoban implementation on Android, go to "Soko++" by Joris Wit.

</comment><comment><USER38> The controls are not small enough to fit on iPhone SE and smaller screens.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry about that, I'll see what I can do

<comment><USER39> Fun game. Wanted to pass on issue I had. Safari on iPhone 7, couldn't use touch controls on level 3 because browser chrome is in the way.

[https://imgur.com/a/nN9YndX](https://imgur.com/a/nN9YndX)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm talking to a friend about buying his father's old iphone, I need that to develop / test my apps.

<comment><USER40> You also can simulate the devices with the chrome debugger?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ha-ckernews Reminds me of Paganitzu

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar. Will look it up.

<comment><USER35> For anyone interested:

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Paganitzu_1991](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Paganitzu_1991)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the google play version supports Portuguese, English, Spanish and Chinese, but it got ads.

</comment><comment><USER41> clever and fun</comment>


The "uncertainty principle" is a mis-translation (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25531 <comment><USER2> My favorite explanation comes from Greg Egan[0]:

"The uncertainty principle is the inability of a quantum system to possess sharply defined values of certain pairs of variables, such as position and momentum. Unfortunately, this simple fact is sometimes shrouded in confusion, some of which probably dates back to a famous thought experiment of Heisenberg's in the 1920s. Heisenberg pointed out that, because light comes in quanta with a minimum amount of energy and momentum for any given wavelength, even if an electron was a point particle straight out of classical physics, we could never illuminate one in order to see where it was without disturbing it to some degree in the process. This is a perfectly true statement — but it's a true statement about a hypothetical alternative universe, because electrons aren't classical point particles. A correct description of an electron, whether as a wave function in ordinary space or a state vector in a Hilbert space, shows that it doesn't need to be "disturbed" by anything in order to be subject to the uncertainty principle. It simply can't possess an exact momentum and an exact position at the same time, any more than a musical note can be a perfect middle C, giving it a well-defined frequency, while lasting for a billionth of a second, giving it a well-defined location in time."

[0] [http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/FOUNDATIONS/04/foun...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/FOUNDATIONS/04/found04.html#s5)

<comment><USER3> > A correct description of an electron, whether as a wave function in ordinary > space or a state vector in a Hilbert space, shows that it doesn't need to be > "disturbed" by anything in order to be subject to the uncertainty principle.

This is, in fact, a result of the uncertainty principle of Fourier analysis. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform#Uncertainty_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform#Uncertainty_principle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not following how "uncertainty" principle is a bad way of putting it. No matter what we do, we cannot know the position and velocity precisely at the same time. If you know position precisely, velocity is uncertain. From what I understand it's not a matter of velocity is "as yet undetermined", if we know the location precisely, then the velocity has many values and will collapse to one value if observed precisely (at which point position will have gone from precise to many valued).

Or should I not be physics-ing in the morning.

<comment><USER5> "Uncertainty" suggests that the position might, in some way, be defined with 100% precision, but it's us, the observers, who are uncertain what the actual value is.

"Unschärferelation" suggests the value coming out of the system (position, impulse, etc) is in a fundamental way not pinned on a single value fixed with 100% precision, but instead it's spread out over a distribution function.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I got it. It's the difference between "I am uncertain" and "It is uncertain". That makes sense.

First discussion that happens in an undergrad quantum mechanics class.

Teacher: "It is uncertain" Student: "Can't we measure it better?" Teacher: "No, it is unknowable, no matter what" Student: "Wtf?"

<comment><USER6> Unscharf (the adjective to Unschärfe) can be translated to "out of focus" or "blur", which kind of describes the phenomenon figuratively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > which transliterates to "unsharpness relationship," but as there is really > no such term in English

Seems like there is: "unsharpness relationship".

</comment><comment><USER8> > "Unbestimmtheit" (Indeterminacy) was on the part of the observer: not > realizing certain aspects of nature at this stage in our knowledge—rather > than proof that nature itself is fundamentally undetermined and uncertain.

And yet Bell's theorem and Aspect's experiment show there are no hidden variables.

</comment><comment><USER9> If I understand this guy right, he's basically saying that the uncertainty principle is just a statement about our ability to measure things, rather than a statement about the actual reality about what variables (hidden or not) are stored by each particle.

I used to think the same, and intuitively this still seems right to me, but apparently there's been a bunch of experiments based on the Bell Inequality that prove that we're wrong.

<comment><USER10> No, I do not think that you are understanding him correctly. What makes you think that?

<comment><USER9> Just one example from the article:

> rather than stating that either position or momentum are "as yet > undetermined", it became common usage and popular wisdom to jump to the > conclusion that there is complete "uncertainty" at the fundamental level of > physics

Can you explain how you drew any other conclusion from the article? The whole thing is driving at this one point.

<comment><USER10> His position is 'that either position or momentum are "as yet undetermined"'. That means that the 'uncertainty' is not due to our ability to measure things, but 'rather […] a statement about the actual reality about what variables (hidden or not) are stored by each particle'. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there actually a thing in physics where you change the measurement by observing it?

I do electrical engineering, and as far as I know, the uncertainty principle means that as the signal in the time domain gets more localized, the signal in the frequency domain gets more spread out (and vica versa). I think ( I don't know for sure) position can be thought of as time domain and momentum can be thought of as frequency domain (or it might be the other way around).

I'm not sure if this relationship actually leads to the Futurama "No fair, you changed the outcome by observing it!"

I could research this to find an answer, but it would take me way too long.

<comment><USER12> Observer effect.

<comment><USER11> Thanks :) That gives me something concrete to google

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favourite scientific mistranslation: Alien hand syndrome.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome)

The original French is "Syndrome de la main étrangère", which should be called "stranger's hand" and describes a condition where brain injury may result in unwanted movements of a hand.

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndrome_de_la_main_%C3%A9tran...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndrome_de_la_main_%C3%A9trang%C3%A8re)

<comment><USER14> In what sense this a mistranslation? If you conflate alien with extra- terrestrial?

<comment><USER15> In current usage, people almost exclusively use "alien" to refer to ETs. The only ones who use it in the sense of "foreigner" are immigration bureaus, and this becomes a source of hilarity whenever they speak to the outside world.

Would you ever say "I had some aliens in my home last night for dinner" and expect someone to interpret that to mean immigrants/tourists/strangers? At best, they would criticize you for using that term to refer to them.

<comment><USER14> Illegal Alien gets quite a few hits on google.

[https://www.google.com/#q=illegal+alien](https://www.google.com/#q=illegal+alien)

<comment><USER15> Perhaps I should have said "immigration law enforcement" instead, but the same point. Outside the that context, "alien" means ET.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This may be a case where the translation ends up more accurate. 'Observer' is really just any other wave/particle. So, this is in terms of all outside perspectives not just machines/scientists.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember the first time someone explained to me that the uncertainty principle was just a fact of waves. Decomposing a single event into frequency space makes no sense, and neither does the inverse, taking a frequency (a succession of regular events) and expecting it to have instantaneous meaning.

When I heard this I felt a profound sadness. After I was told it seemed obvious, simple, intelligible, and the idea of a great cosmic darkness, Chaos disordering and underpinning the universe, had vanished and been replaced by a plain mathematical relationship. Alack.

<comment><AUTHOR> How odd. When I grokked the uncertainty principle (and later, entanglement) I felt a profound sense of euphoria and peace, because the world suddenly made sense. Can you elaborate on why achieving this understanding made you sad? Why is it so important to you to have chaos and disorder?

<comment><USER17> Hard to say - it was a visceral reaction that mostly manifested as a brief resistance to the idea ("no, that can't be right"). I imagine some component of my thought wants a space in the universe that is claimed by mystery. I enjoyed reading Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy", where he discusses the quixotic nature of the double-slit experiment and so on, notably things like observation collapsing the wave function and removing the diffraction pattern. Heisenberg definitely colors these things with an air of mystery, the idea that the operation of the universe flies in the face of what we think of as sensible. I'm someone who has always enjoyed being on the margins, questioning, overturning, poking at consensus. Before I understood the uncertainty principle I think it was a door to a much blacker mystery, and thus a much greater rejection of the notion that "we understand", which I think is something I have always associated with evil, hubris, and folly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the OP is conflating matters that were originally conflated by the theoretical community. Aspect makes the point that until '82 even Feynman did not note the distinction between wave/particle duality and entanglement (only the latter demands non-local aka "spooky" action.) It was only after Bell, et al that e.g. in '82 Feynman recognized the distinctions and per Aspect "typical Feynman he then invented Quantum Computing".

</comment><comment><USER19> The theory of relativity is an misleadingly phrased concept - it should be the "theory of absolutivity" \- because the relativeness is not the new part (galilean and newtonian relative reference frames had been around for centuries) it's reconciling it with the absolute speed of light which was the new part, the part that introduces tricky math and "strange" concepts that don't jive with our day-to-day sensory experiences in physics.

<comment><USER20> I can't agree with the argument that "relativeness is not the new part"\--since relativity introduces the idea that measurements of time and space (and mass, electric fields, magnetic fields, etc.) are relative to the reference frame. Classical mechanics only admits relative measurements of velocity (and energy, momentum, etc).

But if you want to rename it, Einstein said that he should have named it the Theory of Invariance. I'm fond of "relativity" because it admits adjectives like "relativistic". We can say, "At relativistic speeds."

<comment><USER19> well popularly (non-scientifically) relativity is thought to mean that a measurement is relative, and that's generally an older concept than Einstein, even though classical mechanics have a more limited scope of quantities that are measured relatively (position, velocity). There are still things in einstein's theory of relativity that aren't relative, even which would have been relative in the classical system (the speed of light). And the initial math outlays (lorentz transformations) are exactly as I described them, shutting down the possibility that the speed of light is relative, creating an "absolute" measurement.

<comment><USER20> What you are describing as "absolute" is described in the literature as "invariant", which might help if you are doing web searches for more information. "Absolute" usually has a different meaning.</comment></comment></comment></comment>